Update, 24 June, 1.06am: Borrowed Murder in Mesopotamia, Murder is Easy, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side and Parker Pyne Investigates from the library today. Started on Murder in Mesopotamia and finished it right now at 1am. I really should slow down. Agatha Christie is too addicting. 5 books from 5 different detectives. I wanted to borrow Death on the Nile but the library’s copy is on loan, and I can’t really stand the ebook version. The formatting’s all wonky!

Update, 24 June, ~10.30pm: I’ve finished Murder Is Easy! I was a bit thrown off by not having a proper detective in throughout the whole novel. I know Luke Fitzwilliam is supposed to be an ex-policeman but his style of detection seems a bit amateurish. It was supposed to be a Superintendent Battle novel but Battle only came out for, like, the last 10 pages.

Update, 28 June, 10pm: Done with The Mysterious Mr. Quin. This is one of Christie’s earliest works and rather mind-boggling, I have to say. It isn’t as structured as her Poirot stories, but there’s something very intriguing about this mysterious Mr. Quin. Most of the stories have something very ethereal about them, and indeed, a lot of them deal with supernaturalistic elements (e.g. a scene with Mr. Quin so-called summoning our narrator Mr. Satterthwaite to a country estate through a spirit board). I spent half my time wondering if Mr. Quin was the by-product of Mr. Satterthwaite’s fertile imagination, as he interacts only very sparsely with other characters, and chiefly with Mr. Satterthwaite. Even then, his interactions with Mr. Satterthwaite are limited to simple promptings and poignant statements that usually lead Mr. Satterthwaite to discover the real solution of the mystery. Interesting. Mr. Quin is certainly memorable.

Update, 29 June, 4.45am: I couldn’t sleep so I started on and finished A Murder Is Announced. Very interesting premise, the whole thing about seeing an advertisement in the newspapers about a murder being announced and then actually being committed. One thing I don’t quite understand is why Miss Blacklock went through all that trouble with the announcement in the newspapers. Her objective was to get rid of Rudi Scherz, the Swiss receptionist at the hotel, who would recognise her as Charlotte and not Letitia Blacklock – so why all the trouble with a fake burglary and all that? It would attract a large amount of attention from the police, wouldn’t it? Hmmm.

Update, 30 June, 3.20am: I finished The Mirror Crack’d From Side To Side. Miss Marple has a decidedly stronger presence in the book than A Murder Is Announced. I felt sorry for Miss Knight, though she was meant to be an annoying character (perhaps I wouldn’t feel as sorry if she had appeared more). I liked the resolution of the book, though none of the characters were particularly endearing. I certainly didn’t see it coming that Arthur Badcock had been Marina Gregg’s first husband. I did feel annoyed at Heather Badcock, how her insistence on seeing Marina Gregg had caused the mental deficiency of her unborn child and she was the kind of girl who didn’t even realise how her actions would affect other people. It’s exactly the kind of attitude that people who don’t wear masks when they go out with flu and all that. Some things don’t change over time. I still couldn’t help feeling horrified at how Jason Rudd had simply ended his wife’s life like that, though.

Update, 1 July: I got done with Parker Pyne Investigates pretty recently. Parker Pyne, if I’m not wrong, only has this one compilation of short stories as his own book. Just like all other Agatha Christie detectives, he has his own trademarks and signatures. As Mr Quin investigates surreal, almost paranormal cases, Miss Marple with small village cases and Hercule Poirot with city, large-scale cases, Parker Pyne investigates matters of the heart, rather than actual crime. His background is that of a government statistician, so he uses this knowledge of what is most likely to happen based on statistics to help people solve their problems. His signature is the newspaper clipping that he puts in The Times, “Are you happy? If not, contact Mr. Parker Pyne at 17, Richmond Street”. I enjoyed reading this compilation, and certainly I would’ve liked to see Parker Pyne in more stories.

Update, 5 July, 11.50pm: Done with The Man In The Brown Suit. Enjoyed this book thoroughly, primarily due to the frolicking and engaging narrative voices of both protagonist Anne Beddingfield and secondary character, Sir Eustace Pedlar. Sometimes the adventure got a little too out of hand and I started to lose track of exactly which African city were our characters in now, or heading towards, but it didn’t take away anything from the mystery and the plot.

Update, 20 July, 5.40pm: I finished Ordeal by Innocence last night, and a day or two before that, I finished Death on the Nile. With the latter done, I think I have just about finished all the Hercule Poirot stories, with the exception of Curtain which I am putting off reading for as long as possible. For Death on the Nile, I found the love triangle (of sorts) between Linnet Ridgeway, Simon Doyle and Jacqueline de Bellefort horrifying. On one hand, I’m pretty glad that Simon was faithful to Jacqueline to the end, but I was rooting for them, man. Sad that they turned out to be the culprits. For Ordeal by Innocence, I thought it was a very interesting premise, and I found Rachel Argyle a very fascinating character, with her overbearing sociopathic maternity. I like how Agatha Christie varies her sociopaths in weird ways that most people don’t think about.

Update, 23 Aug, 3.15am: I haven’t been updating this thing because there’s always a problem with formatting when I try to update it on my work computer, so I’ve been putting it off. Since the last time I updated, I have finished Sparkling Cyanide,The Sittaford Mystery, By The Pricking Of My Thumbs and The Moving Finger. I found The Sittaford Mystery somehow tedious despite the interesting premise, although I’m not sure if it was because I had tons of books left to read and that stressed me out. Sparkling Cyanide was all right, though it reminded me very strongly of one of the Hercule Poirot cases, Yellow Iris. In fact, I just Wiki’ed it and apparently it was meant to expand on that short story. By The Pricking Of My Thumbs was a really fun romp with Tommy and Tuppence, though much advanced in age but still nevertheless energetic and youthful in their chasing down of mysterious gang leaders. The Moving Finger was also a fun read, though it was another one of those strange novels where it’s supposed to be a Miss Marple mystery but she only appears in the last few pages of the book and seems to see through everything all at once. I have just today bought The Listerdale Mystery from a bargain bookstore, so I’m really excited for that.

Update, 17 Sep, 4am: I have just finished The Listerdale Mystery and Other Stories. This is more of a collection of random Agatha Christie short mystery/suspense stories. They were entertaining enough, but I found that most of them tended to revolve around the same few plot lines. For example, “The Girl In The Train” and “Mr Eastwood’s Adventure” revolved around a genteel young man who is cast out by a rich older relation and gets into a scrape of sorts, and finds himself making his fortune through the exact same ‘unexpected’ way (won’t spoil it for people). Then “The Rajah’s Emerald” and “The Manliness of Edward Robinson” revolved around jewellery (it’s always jewellery if it’s not money or an inheritance in Agatha Christie) that are misplaced in the exact same manner. The very similar plot lines and undeveloped characters lead me to wonder if these were almost a sort of reject pile for Agatha Christie. That is not to say that they weren’t entertaining though.

“The Listerdale Mystery” and “Philomel Cottage” were the stand-out stories for me, especially the latter. I even went to Google the story after that because the ending was rather uncharacteristically ambiguous, but I liked the whole air of horrific suspense throughout. It was a little reminiscent of an Edgar Allen Poe short story.

“Jane In Search Of A Job” reminded me strongly of The Case of the Red-Headed League in the Sherlock Holmes canon at its beginning, but later it panned out in a very different way and I enjoyed it too.

Update, 22 Sep, 3am: Just finished Endless Night and I liked it so much, I had to write a full length review on it here.

Update, 23 Sep, 4am: Finished 4:50 From Paddington. A proper Miss Marple at last. I don’t favour those so-called Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot mysteries where the detective only comes out in the last 20 pages. Miss Marple is properly incorporated into the story here. The premise is as interesting as we can expect from Agatha Christie. An elderly lady witnesses a woman being strangled on a train just running parallel to hers, the 4:50 from Paddington, but there is no suspect and no body. The elderly lady, the primary and only eye-witness to the crime, happens also to be a close friend of Miss Marple and goes to her for help when the police don’t believe her story. Miss Marple then seeks out an acquaintance, a young woman named Lucy Eyelesbarrow (where does Christie get all these fun names from?) to help her out. Ending was unexpected, again as usual. I had hoped that Lucy might’ve thrown in her lot with Inspector Craddock, whom I always imagine to be rather good-looking but apparently not. Aww.

Update, 24 Sep, 3.30am: Just finished Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?. I wish this book had a more interesting cover. In any case, the mystery was an interesting premise, and easily the best thing about the book. Characters and some plot elements were a little cliched (feisty rich girl, feisty poor boy, sinister people, un-sinister people whose motives you still question, misunderstandings, dangerous situations, eventual romance). Still, it kept me reading through all the way to the end. The cast of characters isn’t large, so if you’ve been reading too much Agatha Christie like me, you’ve probably suspected any and all the characters at some point or other, so while the ending and solution wasn’t a huge surprise, I have to give props to Christie’s expert manipulation of the readers’ suspicions to bluff and double bluff and triple bluff us. I also love how Christie uses such a seemingly trivial phrase like: “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” to keep the whole plot together. It’s really one of her signature styles. When the whole adventure begins, more and more suspects are introduced (but not a single one named Evans) and a whole mystery is unravelling but this phrase is never fully explained – right till the end of the book.

“There’s one thing you must tell me,” said Frankie. “I’ve been driven nearly mad with curiosity. Who is Evans?”

“Oh!” said Bassington-ffrench. “So you don’t know that?”

He laughed–and laughed again.

This exchange happens on page 241 of 279, so you can imagine how late we find out the identity of this mysterious Evans. But when we do, it ties in everything so nicely and everything makes perfect sense. P.S. I also love the name Bassington-ffrench. Double lowercase f’s are so quirky.

Update, 24 Sep, 3.30am: Just finished Towards Zero. Agatha Christie probably played around with a different way of telling a murder mystery with this one. Instead of having something happening right at the beginning, she told various fragments of seemingly unrelated scenes that would eventually come together like a jigsaw puzzle into a planned murder near the end of the book. It was OK. The ending and solution was surprising but not downright shocking. It was an entertaining and quick read. I really liked Mr Treves though, I thought he might have made a good spin-off series but it was a pity that he died… 😦 I never liked Nevile or Kay Strange. Both of them seemed way too impetuous to me, and I guess I was justified in my dislike for Nevile. I had a soft spot for Mary Adlin, I was rooting for her and was kinda scared that she might turn out to be the unlikely murderer in the end.

Update, 2 June, 6.30pm: Oh, wow. Look at that. I haven’t updated in more than half a year. Anyway, I have made great progress with Miss Marple novels and I’m pretty pleased by that. I feel like reading Sleeping Murder again. At Bertram’s Hotel was a pretty interesting piece, although I thought the ending was a little abrupt. The premise was a bit too ambitious and wasn’t executed super well but enjoyable all the same.

Post navigation

4 thoughts on “A foray into Agatha Christie”

I’m also reading my way through Agatha Christie’s works–it’s quite a task, isn’t it?! My method is to read them in the order that they were written. I’m up to Five Little Pigs. So far my favorites have been The Seven Dials mystery and The Man in the Brown Suit, though I’m also fond of any of the Tommy and Tuppence novels. I hope you’re enjoying them as well!

I am enjoying them! 🙂 I started because I conveniently happened to have a library near my workplace and since I’ve tendered my resignation, I don’t know how long more I’d get to use this library so I want to finish as much of Agatha Christie’s works as I can. I’m concentrating mainly on Hercule Poirot for now, not in chronological order XD But that’s a good idea, because sometimes she may semi-spoil the endings of earlier books. I enjoyed the Seven Dials mystery as well! That was one of the first I started with. I haven’t read The Man In The Brown Suit yet, maybe I’ll give it a go soon. Tommy & Tuppence was surprisingly enjoyable! I couldn’t put it down!

I agree, I didn’t expect to like Tommy and Tuppence as much as I did! Good luck on your continued reading! At least Christie’s works are common enough that, even if you can’t get them at the library anymore, they are easily found at used book stores or discounted as Ebooks. ^_^

About me

I used to be a pharmacist. Now, I am Literature student. I love writing, reading, traveling, designing, trawling every social media platform imaginable, watching YouTube videos ranging from history documentaries, How It's Made to make-up tutorials and reviews.